Timeline for What would happen to the internet if Google disappeared?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 10, 2018 at 21:00 | comment | added | Jay | @Graham Sure, if Google literally vanished into the mists overnight like Brigadoon, companies that had all their data on Google servers and no backup anywhere else would be in serious trouble. But real life rarely happens that way. The servers won't literally vanish. A realistic scenario would be that Google would announce they're shutting down this service and give clients some period of time to get their data off. Maybe not, of course. We'd have to know more details of the hypothetical scenario. Seriously, big as Google is now, I presume they will go out of business SOMEDAY. | |
| Jun 21, 2016 at 10:12 | comment | added | Graham | @Jay I'm a software developer too (although not web-based). It's not so much who hosts the website, it's about who's got your data. Where's your database of orders and customers and stock? If it's still in house, you're OK. But if you're reliant on Google hosting that too, and Google vanishes overnight, then you can't ever get that data back. From what I know about stats of companies where they lose that, it's nearly always fatal for small companies. Larger companies can generally fight back, but they're massively weakened. | |
| Jun 20, 2016 at 17:17 | comment | added | Jay | RE cell phones: I was questioning if Google servers are involved in any way in transmission of cell phone messages. If the answer is no -- and since you brought the question up, that seems a likely answer -- then I agree with your statements. | |
| Jun 20, 2016 at 17:16 | comment | added | Jay | @Graham Hmm, I'm a software developer. I just recently moved several web sites from our own servers to Amazon. It took a couple of days. Sure, a bigger or more complex site might take longer, but I don't see how it could be a show-stopper. If Google went away with no warning and your only backups were also on Google, that could destroy you. If somehow ASP stopped working and you had to port to Java, that could take a long time, but that's not the sort of scenario we're talking about. | |
| Jun 20, 2016 at 13:44 | comment | added | Graham | @Jay ToddWilcox is correct about risks if you're using Google to host stuff. There are other options (Amazon is the most obvious) but changing platforms is not a quick job. This could genuinely be fatal for businesses. For phones though, there is nothing which needs Google to be there. If there was, then putting your phone into flight mode (airplane mode) would kill it when you disconnected from all networks. | |
| Jun 20, 2016 at 13:22 | comment | added | Jay | @graham Ok, maybe not. I don't know enough about the technical details of how the cell phone network works. If all you lost was the Google App Store, and I suppose some level of tech support, etc. So the impact could be even less than I'm supposing. | |
| Jun 20, 2016 at 9:50 | comment | added | Graham | @ToddWilcox Please could you expand on how you think Google vanishing would affect Android phones? Sure, ongoing development would be massively hit. But all existing phones would continue to work, and the source code would still be there for anyone to continue work on. (One of the benefits of Git is that there is no central server for source control.) | |
| Jun 19, 2016 at 14:36 | comment | added | Michael | There is F-Droid for free (as in Freedom) software as alternative to the Google Play store. | |
| Jun 18, 2016 at 17:11 | comment | added | Jay | ... back to normal. More realistically, Google isn't going to just vanish overnight with no warning. People would see it coming and take precautions. There have been plenty of big bankruptcies of major companies in history. Very hard for the stock holders. Mild inconvenience for almost everyone else. | |
| Jun 18, 2016 at 17:09 | comment | added | Jay | @nocomprende Apparently so: 52% android, 40% apple, 8% other. statista.com/chart/1356/smartphone-market-share-in-q2-2013 Still, if Android phones quit working overnight with no warning, I presume people would be rushing to the store to buy iPhones and Blackberries and Windows phones. There probably wouldn't be enough phones available to satisfy the demand, and there would be serious inconvenience for months while they ramped up production. Or while some other company got the infrastructure in place to make the Android phones work again. But after a few months, things would be ... | |
| Jun 16, 2016 at 23:29 | comment | added | user11599 | My guess is that the main long term result would be that it would be much harder to raise money for technology companies (with a resulting slowdown in internet innovation), as stockholders would take an astonishing loss if Google disappeared (market cap is roughly $500 billion). | |
| Jun 16, 2016 at 23:11 | comment | added | user17228 | Don't most people have Android phones? (Took me a while, but I finally got one.) If most people are inconvenienced by something, that is a big issue. There might not be a big enough somewhere else for them all to go. That is why "Too big to fail" is a recipe for disaster. (If you needed a recipe, I usually just improvise.) @ToddWilcox I am envisioning large numbers of people all making a rush on the data bank trying to download their stuff before Google's servers closed permanently. Seems... oddly familiar. Maybe the government should back their servers in case of bankruptcy? | |
| Jun 16, 2016 at 18:45 | comment | added | Todd Wilcox | @Jay At the risk of digressing, it can be difficult and time-consuming to pull an entire server off of a cloud service (or put one up). I downloaded a server from Azure one time on a 100 Mb pipe and I just left it overnight to export. A better option with advance notice might be to export any databases, copy those files directly from one cloud service to another, and build new servers on the new service and import the databases/data. Depending on the size of the system, it could be very expensive and time consuming. | |
| Jun 16, 2016 at 18:20 | comment | added | Jay | @ToddWilcox Yes. Business who had data on Google, and no backup anywhere else, would be in trouble. If the Web was a big part of their business, they might go bankrupt before they could rebuild it all somewhere else. That would be the worst case. If they had even a short warning that Goggle was going down, presumably they'd quickly make a backup so they could just find another hosting provider and be back up within what, a couple of days? | |
| Jun 16, 2016 at 18:18 | comment | added | Jay | @SMSvonderTann That's my point. They got bought out, somebody else took over their planes, I assume most of the employees went with the new company, those who didn't mostly went to other airlines, etc. | |
| Jun 16, 2016 at 18:16 | history | edited | Jay | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 16, 2016 at 17:42 | comment | added | SMS von der Tann | Didn't US Airways (at least the airfleet) just become part AAL? | |
| Jun 16, 2016 at 17:34 | comment | added | Todd Wilcox | The hardest hit would be people who have an Android phone as their only phone and companies hosting mission critical servers only in Google cloud services. Some businesses would never recover. | |
| Jun 16, 2016 at 17:00 | history | answered | Jay | CC BY-SA 3.0 |